Bad Planning
by Sarah1281
Summary: Henry being Neal's isn't accidentally revealed to him and so he lets the group go on their way back to Storybrooke without him. Now Tamara is put in the somewhat difficult position of trying to get him to change his mind so she can go try and destroy magic when he has some pretty valid reasons to stay away.


Bad Planning

Tamara had had Neal's apartment under enough surveillance that by the time she got there that evening (an hour sooner than usual but it was as late as she was able to wait) she could barely contain herself. She had to, of course, and let him bring it up because how was his perfectly nice normal fiancé supposed to know that his magical past had quite literally come to visit?

"Are you okay, Neal?" she asked once they had finished washing up after dinner.

Neal started guiltily. "Yeah, why wouldn't I be?"

"You just look a little upset," Tamara told him, projecting as much empathy as possible into her voice.

Neal looked away. "It's nothing."

"Neal, honey, you know that I love you and I respect your privacy," Tamara said earnestly. "I would never want to do anything to make you uncomfortable. If you don't want to talk to me about whatever it is that is obviously bothering you then you don't have to but please have the decency to not lie to me."

Neal shut his eyes and sighed. "No, Tamara, I'm sorry. You should know. It's just…this isn't easy to talk about."

Tamara smiled winningly at him and took his hand in his. "I'm right here, baby. Just tell me however much or however little you want, do it in your own time."

Neal nodded and nervously licked his lips. "Right, well, you remember how I told you about my parents?"

Tamara nodded. "Your mother died a long time ago and a few years later your father abandoned you."

"Well, it wasn't quite as clear-cut as all of that," Neal admitted.

Tamara looked puzzled. "I don't understand. Are you saying that's not what happened?"

Neal shook his head. "No, it is. Or at least I think it is. One day my mother was there and the next my father said she was dead. It wasn't until shortly after my father abandoned me that I ran into a man who had her picture. But I'll get to that in a minute. Things were hard with just my father and I. We were in a bad neighborhood and everyone hated us. I just wanted to leave, to go someplace new and get a fresh start. And my father promised to go with me."

"Oh, Neal…" Tamara said, squeezing his hand.

"Well we didn't really have the, uh, money to go but I found a way to get us to leave. I found a train, right, and we could sneak on it. We needed to jump on it. I did but he didn't. I begged him to get on with me but he just looked at me and watched it carry me away and, well, I couldn't get off by that point and I haven't seen him since."

"But I don't understand," Tamara protested. "Why would he agree to go with you and then back off and abandon you?"

"Because he was a coward," Neal said bitterly, clenching his free hand and unclenching it. "He was afraid."

"But then, oh Neal understand I'm not trying to make excuses for your father but…if that's the case then it was an accident. It was a terrible accident but it wasn't on purpose and he never tried to abandon you. I know that that didn't make your life any easier after he was gone and it can't change your feelings on the matter but surely the knowledge that he didn't mean to must be good for something!" Tamara burst out.

His father had found him. His father from a magical world and magical powers had found him and Neal had just let him go. He could be such a fool sometimes but that was why Tamara was his fiancé and not just keeping tabs on him. If he needed a little push to reconcile with his father and take her to the magic then she would give him one.

"I was talking about the man who found me who had my mother's picture? When he found out that I was her son he wanted to play daddy or something but I wasn't really in a place to deal with that since I had just found out that this man was my mother's lover."

Tamara winced and it was almost genuine. That seriously would have sucked. "Oh, Neal…"

"I accused him of killing my mother and he told me the truth. He said that he just ran off with my mother and my father lied about it so I wouldn't have to know that she abandoned me. He said that my father was looking for me and that he and my mother ran into my father after he had abandoned me. He attacked the guy because he had been made to think that the guy had kidnapped my mother and was holding her as some sort of a-a sex slave but then my mother came out to stop him. She admitted they just ran off together because she hated her life and loved this other guy. Then my father blamed my mother for him abandoning me and killed her," Neal said heavily.

Tamara's eyes widened. That wasn't exactly what she had been expecting and now it all made sense why Neal wanted to avoid a little family reunion. The problem was that that kind of avoidance was not going to help their plans at all. "I-I don't know what to say."

"I don't think there's anything _to _say," Neal told her. "And while I'm on the subject of honesty, I should tell you that Neal isn't my real name."

She couldn't say that she was surprised. 'Neal' was just such an ordinary name for a man who came from the kind of place she suspected him of being from. And she knew his criminal record. A man like that was bound to have an alias or two. "What is?"

Neal's cheeks turned a delicate pink. "Baelfire. Everyone called me Bae."

"Bae," Tamara repeated softly. "I like it."

Neal's lips quirked upwards. "Well, I'm glad. Though I tend to think of myself as Neal now. Bae was a naïve little boy who never expected his father to abandon him and his mother to run off because she couldn't stand to be around him and his father. And he certainly never thought that one could kill the other. Neal knows better."

"I'm sorry that Neal had to go through that. I never made Bae but I know he didn't deserve it. I think that you're remarkably brave to have come so far and ended up in such a good place here with me," Tamara said, looking at him in that coy way she knew he loved.

And sure enough, he was soon grinning goofily at her. "Thank you. I've never really been able to talk to anyone about this before and I can't believe how much better I feel."

"But why were you thinking about this today in particular?" Tamara asked. "I've known you for awhile and you've never looked like this before. Is it the anniversary of the day that any of this happened or something?"

Neal hesitated but then shook his head. "No. Today I ran into an ex-girlfriend on the street. It turns out she knew my father – though no one realized her ex and his son were the same person – and he somehow got her to owe him a favor so he made her help me track him down. He was here. He found me. He wanted me to head back with them but that just wasn't happening even if he did get…sick."

Poisoned was the correct term, she believed.

While she was trying to figure out what to say to convince him, he held up his hands. "Oh, no, don't give me that look, Tamara!"

"What look?"

"That 'he's your father and he loves you and he just made a mistake and has spent all this time trying to find you again' look," Neal told her.

"I can say all that with a look?" Tamara asked. "Damn, I'm good."

"Believe me, I know exactly what he went through to get me back and he went far, far beyond reason but he really should have thought about that before he abandoned me," Neal said flatly.

"Neal, it sounds like your plan to escape was really dangerous and he could have been hurt or even killed," Tamara said slowly. She didn't know the real story but she was almost positive that refusing to jump on a moving train – already a risky proposition – didn't come into it. Maybe, given that magic was not of this world and he didn't seem to be either, he went to this world and his father refused to get into the portal with him. "Can you really blame him for hesitating for a second too long and having you be carried away?"

Neal set his jaw and crossed his arms stubbornly. "Actually, I can, because I was only a child and I was willing to do it."

"But it was just one moment and I think it's pretty clear that if he's still looking for you twenty years later that he deeply regretted his moment of weakness," Tamara said persuasively. "Would it really be so bad to hear him out? And you said he was sick, too."

"He killed my mother."

"According to some guy who claimed he ran off with her and who is the most likely culprit," Tamara countered. "At the very least you could ask him about that."

"That's not really a conversation I want to have him with, Tamara. In fact, I don't want to have any sort of conversation with him. I just don't want him to be a part of my life and it doesn't matter if he died tomorrow because that wouldn't change anything."

"I just feel like you're being a little unfair," Tamara said.

Neal snorted. "Unfair? Unfair is having to make your own way in an unfamiliar world with danger lurking around every corner because your father _promised _you he'd go and you never would have left if he hadn't and then he was too much of a coward to keep that promise. Unfair is all the people he's hurt and maybe even killed to get to me. Unfair is the fact that it doesn't matter _how _sorry he is because nothing can change the past. I'm always going to have that in my past and he can't fix it. So I don't care if he's sorry because it's not good enough. He can't force me to forgive him and I'm not really looking to be the bigger man here."

She was getting nowhere with this and decided to try a different tactic. "But this isn't just about him, Neal. I know that this must have been twenty years ago and yet you're still carrying around so much hurt inside of you. Don't you think that you owe it to yourself to go after him and finally get some closure? You didn't have any when he failed to follow you when you were leaving and now you have a chance. You can say all those things you always wanted to say to him and if you truly don't want a relationship with him then you don't have to have one. Maybe this can finally help you heal."

"I'm about as healed as I think I'm ever going to be," Neal replied. "And I said anything I might have ever had to say to him when he was here this afternoon."

Mostly that had consisted of telling his father that he wanted nothing to do with him and to go away and to blow off the man's apologies.

"But he's _sick_," Tamara protested.

"And if he's not dead by now he'll be fine," Neal said confidently. "I'm the injured party here. I'm the abandoned one. I'm not about to put myself in a situation I wouldn't be comfortable in to make the person who ruined my life and probably killed my mother feel better. Emma certainly doesn't want me there after the way our relationship ended and I have a life here. With you."

"Well what if I wanted to find out a little more about the man I'm going to marry," Tamara tried. "You never had any family and I understood but now your dad's back in the picture or at least he'd like to be." Maybe that was still a way in. Maybe even if Neal wouldn't go back and let her tag along then she could at least get directions and head there under the guise of getting to know her fiancé's father (and he would allow her as a way to get closer to Neal and maybe change his mind) and get rid of magic that way.

Neal grimaced. "I suppose that I can understand the impulse but trust me, Tamara, when I say that you are far better off having nothing to do with him. He's a monster and he destroys everyone in his path, even those he claims to love. If he ever got it into his head you were keeping him from me-"

"But he wouldn't! I want you to reconcile," Tamara protested.

"It doesn't matter. Towards the end he just wasn't in his right mind," Neal told her. "I'm sorry, Tamara. I know that an opportunity like this would make you really excited but I just can't risk it."

Tamara forced a smile and stayed for a few minutes longer before excusing herself. She had to talk to Owen. It was starting to occur to her that maybe they should have had some sort of backup plan for if the magical man running from his past couldn't be convinced to take her to the heart of it.


End file.
